A double-edged sequel to 'Scale Without Law' (10. 5281/zenodo. 21016309), adversarially verified. (1) POSITIVE EDGE: the anti-MOND sign theorem's operative premise is the bath STATE, not ghost-freedom -- an explicitly ghost-free two-level bath in a population-inverted (non-KMS) steady state flips the sign of the worldline mass shift (deltaₘ proportional to pg - pₑ), with unitarity intact; lab-real physics (gain-assisted anomalous dispersion, Wang-Kuzmich-Dogariu 2000) ; the spectral density generalizes in a stationary NESS to rhoNESS (omega) = sum |Bₙm|² (pₙ - pₘ) delta (omega - omegaₘn). Ghost-freedom and unitarity do NOT force the anti-MOND sign; passivity does. (2) A NEW RIGIDITY WALL: for linear coupling to a FREE bosonic field the commutator is a c-number, so the response is STATE-INDEPENDENT -- no thermal, squeezed, or pumped Gaussian state of a free field can flip the sign; pumping free fields only adds noise. The escape requires an ANHARMONIC medium; the de Sitter-Unruh free-field bath -- this framework's own premise -- cannot carry the MOND sign at ANY occupation. (3) THE THERMOSTAT THEOREM: 'the de Sitter horizon is the pump' fails four independent ways -- the Gibbons-Hawking state is KMS at TdS (= the passivity clause; zero extractable work, Pusz-Woronowicz 1978) ; horizon occupation in the galactic band (~10²-10³ H0) is 1 at Gaia DR4. Scale Without Law's trichotomy stands unweakened on its own turf; its nonlocal horn is now stated with edges instead of hope. Claims explicitly NOT made: no pump, no derived mu or a0, no weakening of the passive theorem, nothing beyond gravity. All results backed by 7 committed scripts (exit 0), independently re-derived by an adversarial verifier. The author retracted all earlier 'theory of everything' claims (2026-06-23) ; this note makes none.
Carl P. Zimmerman (Thu,) studied this question.